BZRK: Reloaded (BZRK 2)

Everyone was busy cleaning up the town. In this case it meant using buckets of a gentle acid wash to scrub the curving nickel alloy walls with long-handled brushes. The walls were already clean— cleanliness was part of sustainable happiness—so this was more an act of devotion than of simple housekeeping.

More immediately noticeable was the touch-up painting on the great pillar that rose through the center of the sphere, as well as similar work on the entrance to the tunnel that connected Benjaminia with Charlestown. The most adept artists touched up the painted sky with its wondrous image of the Great Souls reaching out a hand to God on their left and Darwin on their right.

It all would have gone much easier but for the storm that raged outside, producing waves so steep they sent the weak of stomach racing to thoughtfully placed buckets.

Fortunately Minako McGrath did not get seasick.

The nickel steel sphere that defined Benjaminia was forty meters—131 feet—in diameter. The great pillar rose up through the middle. A flat, level platform of plywood—also in need of some grassgreen touch-up paint—flattened the bottom of the sphere, providing a level surface, a sort of lowest floor.

Fourteen-year-old Minako had never been a math whiz, but she cared to an insane degree about numbers. Forty meters in diameter was not a good number.

The floor of the sphere, that wooden platform, was also an even, easily divisible number: twenty-four meters diameter.

Minako was not happy. Not “sustainably happy,” in that obnoxious Nexus Humanus phrase, nor any other kind of happy. She was sad to the point of desperation. It had been just ten days since she had been hauled, kicking and punching, aboard this nightmare ship.

Ten, also, was not a good number. It was not prime, nor was it divisible by either three or seven. There were good numbers and bad numbers, and the numbers in Benjaminia all seemed to be bad.

Six days earlier Minako had been walking along the beach at Toguchi. Toguchi wasn’t much of a place, a small town even by Okinawan standards. You couldn’t even brag about the beach. There were no resort hotels or boardwalk, just vibrant green bushes and low-slung, wind-chastened trees edging right up against the narrow strand.

Minako had been thinking, and of course counting her steps— the number to hit was 701, a prime—and pausing occasionally to look out to sea and wish the clouds weren’t so thick and low and the sun could be seen setting. Her OCD—obsessive compulsive disorder—was often worse in the fall and early winter when the days grew shorter. It was almost as if sunlight banished her compulsions, or at least lessened their demands, so that she could lie out on this same beach without quite as many numbers careening around inside her head. But now, with the sea turned gray to match the sky, her carefree season was over.

A boat had come ashore, a Zodiac. There were three men in it, all dressed in rain slickers. Two were white, one Asian. Minako saw herself as Asian, though her father was an American marine and her mother Japanese.

The men saw her, stared at her a bit actually, so that it made her uncomfortable, But then two of them—one of the Caucasians and the Asian—had gone off across the beach into town.

Three was a good number. One, two, three, five, seven, eleven, and thirteen: the first seven prime numbers. The one man left behind, that was okay. The two who left were okay as well.

Which just went to prove that numbers aren’t everything.

This late in both the season and the day there wouldn’t be much going on in Toguchi town for the two men to do—they might find a bowl of noodles and some tea, but there was no nightlife. They were a long way from the lights of Naha.

Minako wondered why she assumed they were hungry. They looked like men who wanted something. And what else could it be?

She continued walking along the beach, coming closer to the boat and the man guarding it. He was smoking a cigarette and avoiding looking at her. He seemed jumpy. Was he a smuggler? A drug smuggler? If so, she should run.

But running away seemed like a strange overreaction. There was no crime in Toguchi. Someone being picked up by the local police for public drunkenness was a crime wave by Toguchi standards. Minako knew: her mother was the only police officer in the area.

Minako curved her path away from the shore and away from the boat. It would mean a possibly very difficult count adjustment. Her routine required her to walk from the southern path along the beach, down to near the high-water line where the driftwood scattered. The steps from the tree line down to the high-water line didn’t have to be counted. But once she turned and started walking north she needed it to be exactly 701 steps. Then, if she had done it properly, she could turn back toward the town and be able to aim for the path home. Curving or avoiding made it harder to calibrate. She could end up having to take some ridiculous mincing steps to get the count just right. That would work, yes, but it would be unsatisfying.

Out at sea was a ship. The light was poor and it was hard to make it out, but it looked strange, like a sort of white peapod with four white domes half-protruding above decks. Four troubling domes.

Had it been three it would have been better.

That’s where the men had come from, that ship. Had to be. In which case they were not likely to be drug smugglers. Still, Minako considered for a moment phoning her mother. It was not Minako’s job to be an informer—as she had repeatedly had to reassure the older brothers and sisters of her friends when she saw them smoking pot.

Still . . .

She compromised and sent a text. A Zodiac has landed at the beach with 3 men.

That made her feel better: duty done.

Three hundred and eighty-two . . .

Three hundred and eighty-three . . .

Minako was a pretty girl, with long hair the color of darkest honey and unnaturally large light brown eyes. The flaw that bothered her most was that her mouth sometimes looked a little crooked, and her chin could be pointed when seen in profile. That, and she had a sprinkling of freckles across her upper cheeks.

Of course, at her school, she was quite a freak. She was not the only Japanese American—after all, there had been thousands of U.S. marines on Okinawa since World War II—but unlike many she looked as white as she did Japanese. Her father had been an Irish American, and no, her mother had not been a prostitute or some party girl. Minako’s parents had been married legally. They had been madly in love.